What command can I use in Linux to check if there is a file in a given directory (or its subdirectories) that contains a ~at the end of the file's name?
For example, if I'm at a directory called t which contains many subdirectories, etc, I would like to remove all files that end with a ~.
Watch out for filenames with spaces in them!
find ./ -name "*~" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
with GNU find
find /path -type f -name "*~" -exec rm {} +
or
find /path -type f -name "*~" -delete
find ./ -name '*~' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f
Here find will search the directory ./ and all sub directories, filtering for filenames that match the glob '*~' and printing them (with proper quoting courtesy of alberge). The results are passed to xargs to be appended to rm -f and the resulting string run in a shell. You can use multiple paths, and there are many other filters available (just read man find).
you can use a find, grep, rm combination, something like
find | grep "~" | xargs rm -f
Probably others have better ideas :)
Related
I'm trying to work out a command which deletes sql files older than 15 days.
The find part is working but not the rm.
rm -f | find -L /usr/www2/bar/htdocs/foo/rsync/httpdocs/db_backups -type f \( -name '*.sql' \) -mtime +15
It kicks out a list of exactly the files I want deleted but is not deleting them. The paths are correct.
usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dIPRrvW] file ...
unlink file
/usr/www2/bar/htdocs/foo/rsync/httpdocs/db_backups/20120601.backup.sql
...
/usr/www2/bar/htdocs/foo/rsync/httpdocs/db_backups/20120610.backup.sql
What am I doing wrong?
You are actually piping rm's output to the input of find. What you want is to use the output of find as arguments to rm:
find -type f -name '*.sql' -mtime +15 | xargs rm
xargs is the command that "converts" its standard input into arguments of another program, or, as they more accurately put it on the man page,
build and execute command lines from standard input
Note that if file names can contain whitespace characters, you should correct for that:
find -type f -name '*.sql' -mtime +15 -print0 | xargs -0 rm
But actually, find has a shortcut for this: the -delete option:
find -type f -name '*.sql' -mtime +15 -delete
Please be aware of the following warnings in man find:
Warnings: Don't forget that the find command line is evaluated
as an expression, so putting -delete first will make find try to
delete everything below the starting points you specified. When
testing a find command line that you later intend to use with
-delete, you should explicitly specify -depth in order to avoid
later surprises. Because -delete implies -depth, you cannot
usefully use -prune and -delete together.
P.S. Note that piping directly to rm isn't an option, because rm doesn't expect filenames on standard input. What you are currently doing is piping them backwards.
find /usr/www/bar/htdocs -mtime +15 -exec rm {} \;
Will select files in /usr/www/bar/htdocs older than 15 days and remove them.
Another simpler method is to use locate command. Then, pipe the result to xargs.
For example,
locate file | xargs rm
Use xargs to pass arguments, with the option -rd '\n' to ignore spaces in names:
"${command}" | xargs -rd '\n' rm
Include --force if you want to also remove read only files.
Assuming you aren't in the directory containing the *.sql backup files:
find /usr/www2/bar/htdocs/foo/rsync/httpdocs/db_backups/*.sql -mtime +15 -exec rm -v {} \;
The -v option above is handy it will verbosely output which files are being deleted as they are removed.
I like to list the files that will be deleted first to be sure. E.g:
find /usr/www2/bar/htdocs/foo/rsync/httpdocs/db_backups/*.sql -mtime +15 -exec ls -lrth {} \;
When I do
rm file.txt
or
rm *.txt
I'm prompted for each file, since I didn't specify the -f option to rm.
But when I do this:
find . -type f -name '*.txt' | xargs rm
the files are removed without the confirmation.
What is the logics behind this? Is it possible to find the reason in some documentation? I cannot explain why this would be the case.
You have an alias set for the rm command to 'rm -i'. Therefore if you invoke the command directly as in
rm file.txt
or
rm *.txt
the alias will be expanded. If you will call it with xargs as in
find . -type f -name '*.txt' | xargs rm
The rm is passed as a simple string argument to xargs and is later invoked by xargs without alias substitution of the shell.
You alias is probably defined in ~/.bashrc, in case you want to remove it.
you can use this simple command to solve your problem
find . -type f -name '*.txt' -delete
Depending on your version of xargs you may have the --no-run-if-empty GNU extension option available to you:
find . -type f -name '*.txt' | xargs --no-run-if-empty rm -rf
I have a Linux-System where some users put files with ftp in a Directory. In this Directory there are sub-directories which the users can create. Now I need a script that searches for all files in those subdirectories and moves them in a single Directory (for backup). The Problem: The Sub directories shouldn´t be removed.
the directory for the users is /files/media/documents/
and the files have to be moved in the Directory /files/dump/. I don´t care about files in /files/media/documents/, they are already handled by another script.
I already tried this script:
for dir in /files/media/documents/
do
find "$dir/" -iname '*' -print0 | xargs -0 mv -t /files/dump/
done
Instead of iterating, you could just use find. In man-page there is a "-type" option documented, so for moving only files you could do:
find "/files/media/documents/" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 mv -t /files/dump/
You also won't like to find files in /files/media/documents/, but all sub-directories? Simply add "-mindepth":
find "/files/media/documents/" -type f -mindepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 mv -t /files/dump/
Alternatively you could also use "-exec" to skip a second command (xargs):
find "/files/media/documents/" -type f -mindepth 1 -exec mv {} /files/dump/ \;
In a Linux terminal, how to delete all files from a folder except one or two?
For example.
I have 100 image files in a directory and one .txt file.
I want to delete all files except that .txt file.
From within the directory, list the files, filter out all not containing 'file-to-keep', and remove all files left on the list.
ls | grep -v 'file-to-keep' | xargs rm
To avoid issues with spaces in filenames (remember to never use spaces in filenames), use find and -0 option.
find 'path' -maxdepth 1 -not -name 'file-to-keep' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
Or mixing both, use grep option -z to manage the -print0 names from find
In general, using an inverted pattern search with grep should do the job. As you didn't define any pattern, I'd just give you a general code example:
ls -1 | grep -v 'name_of_file_to_keep.txt' | xargs rm -f
The ls -1 lists one file per line, so that grep can search line by line. grep -v is the inverted flag. So any pattern matched will NOT be deleted.
For multiple files, you may use egrep:
ls -1 | grep -E -v 'not_file1.txt|not_file2.txt' | xargs rm -f
Update after question was updated:
I assume you are willing to delete all files except files in the current folder that do not end with .txt. So this should work too:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;
find supports a -delete option so you do not need to -exec. You can also pass multiple sets of -not -name somefile -not -name otherfile
user#host$ ls
1.txt 2.txt 3.txt 4.txt 5.txt 6.txt 7.txt 8.txt josh.pdf keepme
user#host$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -name keepme -not -name 8.txt -delete
user#host$ ls
8.txt keepme
Use the not modifier to remove file(s) or pattern(s) you don't want to delete, you can modify the 1 passed to -maxdepth to specify how many sub directories deep you want to delete files from
find . -maxdepth 1 -not -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;
You can also do:
find -maxdepth 1 \! -name "*.txt" -exec rm -f {} \;
In bash, you can use:
$ shopt -s extglob # Enable extended pattern matching features
$ rm !(*.txt) # Delete all files except .txt files
So to remove all files ending with .lnx, the cmd would be rm *.lnx, right?
If I want to remove all files that do NOT end with [.lnx], what command should I use?
Is there such a thing?
You can use this:
$ rm !(*.lnx)
!(pattern-list)
Matches anything except one of the given patterns.
A pattern-list is a list of one or more patterns separated by a ‘|’.
find . -depth 1 -type f -not -name '*.lnx' -delete
find all files (-type f) in the current directory (-depth 1) which do not match the filename (-not -name '*.lnx'), and delete them (-delete)
As always, test this first. Run it without the -delete to see all the files that match.
ls | grep -v '\.lnx$' | xargs rm